The suggestions started early. Months before Lashify had officially launched, one of her investors, who had ties to the cosmetics industry, pulled her aside. He told her to prepare to pay influencers to speak positively about her lashes on YouTube and Instagram. She thought he was being dramatic. He wasn’t.

Lotti recalls the investor saying that if she wanted Lashify to succeed, quality didn’t matter, nor did customer satisfaction—only influencers. And they didn’t come cheap. She was told to expect to shell out $50,000 to $70,000 per influencer just to make her company’s name known, an insane amount for a new startup. There was no way around it; that’s just how things worked.

The question of whether too much aerobic exercise is bad for your heart was hotly debated for several years after that 2012 study. The Cooper Clinic data, when it was finally published in a peer-reviewed journal more than two years later, had been reanalyzed so that the supposed dangers of too much running disappeared. But by then the idea was firmly implanted in the public mind: marathons are dangerous. (I wrote in depth on this dispute, and how the evidence has shifted, in this 2016 feature.) The topic no longer pops up in the headlines as regularly as it did a few years ago, but it’s still lurking in people’s minds.

I sipped my last chilled vodka with lime last September. There wasn’t a lot of pomp when I bid farewell to cocktails. I didn’t want to broadcast my decision because I’d unsuccessfully tried to go long stretches before. Usually I made it a couple of days, maybe a few weeks. When I started this time, I didn’t know how long my booze break would last. Maybe a month, I figured.

That 30 days turned into more than a year. Although I miss the instant relaxation that comes when alcohol hits the bloodstream, I don’t long for what came after: occasional hangovers, interrupted sleep and feeling inexplicably sad when I woke up. I realized I was having a drink or few every day — and although it wasn’t wrecking my life or my health, I wanted to know what would happen if I stopped.

In recent years, many Americans have embraced vitamin D and fish oil pills, their enthusiasm fueled by a steady trickle of suggestive research studies linking higher levels of vitamin D with lower rates of cancer and other ills, and fish consumption with reduced heart disease.

Now a large and rigorous government-funded randomized trial — the only such study of omega-3 fish oils ever carried out in healthy adults, and the largest trial ever done of high-dose vitamin D — has found the supplements do not lower cancer rates in healthy adults. Nor do they reduce the rate of major cardiovascular events, a composite of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from cardiovascular disease. The trial is of the kind considered the gold standard in medicine.

But I didn’t know any other way. I needed some kind of diet deprogramming, but did that even exist? As it turned out, yes. It’s called intuitive eating.

That’s how I describe intuitive eating when someone asks me what it is. It’s not a new concept; the anti-diet has been around pretty much since the diet. Dietitians Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole were among the first to turn it into an actual program, which they laid out in their book, Intuitive Eating (first published in 1995, followed by two later editions). Intuitive eating was soon adopted by a number of nutrition professionals (and eating disorder treatment programs), but still, it’s the kind of mystical-sounding phrase that often raises eyebrows — which tend to shoot up even higher when I explain the fundamentals. In intuitive eating, you can (and should) eat whatever you want. There are no good or bad foods, no points, no goal weight — no focus on weight whatsoever. The point is to eradicate all those judgments and emotional hang-ups we’ve attached to eating, and learn to see food as just food again. Perhaps even crazier, you learn to trust yourself to make your own choices. Everything is on the table.

This is a long article with a lot of information. To sum up the key points:

Standard tools used to measure website usage are missing lots of data due to the use of ad blockers.
Blocked tools include Google Analytics (which also reports conversions back to Google Ads), Google Tag Manager, Facebook Pixel and Google Ads remarketing code.
The proportion of visitors not being measured can be massive – over 78% in the case of the Professional Speaking Association for example.
There is a strong downward trend in the proportion of visitors that can be measured.
This presents challenges for all organizations. I recommend:

Understanding and monitoring the level of misreporting of your users. This will inform the level of trust you can have in any tools affected.
Focusing on the most important metrics. e.g. email clicks, number of orders and average order values. These are not affected by ad blockers.
Consider using alternative technology. e.g. website log file analysis to understand website use. But only if these data provide insights that drive useful actions.

The 400 Individual Medley is a delicate balance of speed and endurance across the four competitive strokes: Butterfly, Backstroke, Breaststroke and Freestyle. While this is considered one of the most difficult events to master because of the stroke variability, endurance, speed, and transition turns; it is also an event that you can dramatically improve over the course of a season or even swimming career. Below are a few tips on how to best approach training and racing the 400 IM:

Background
I have tried every GTD approach and software application under the sun. Without fail they fall into two camps: not enough organization, or far too much organization. I finally developed a system that works well for me, is low-friction, and keeps me organized (even though by nature I am a very disorganized person.)

The system has several benefits:

Answers the question of 'what do I do next?', which is the ultimate productivity killer.
Keeps my working memory uncluttered.
Keeps me from um'ing during my daily standups. I always know what I worked on yesterday.
Is a handy record of accomplishments that I can reference when it's time for my review, I want to ask for a raise, or I'm updating my resume.
Provides a reminder that I do, in fact, get things done and that I don't, in fact, suck at my job.
The system consists of a number of folders, each containing a specific kind of text file. I use BBEdit and open the parent folder as a project so that I have all of my subfolders in a tree view with easy access to their enclosed documents. You should be able to do the same thing in the editor of your choice.